House debates
Tuesday, 8 February 2022
Committees
Northern Australia Joint Committee; Report
5:21 pm
Warren Entsch (Leichhardt, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
On behalf of the Joint Standing Committee on Northern Australia, I present the committee's report, incorporating a dissenting report, entitled The engagement of traditional owners in the economic development of northern Australia.
Report made a parliamentary paper in accordance with standing order 39(e).
by leave—On behalf of the Joint Standing Committee on Northern Australia, I wish to make a few remarks on the committee's report on the engagement of traditional owners in the economic development of northern Australia, which has just been presented. This report has shown that traditional owner communities across northern Australia are striving to participate in the development of the region. They are working for the advancement of their own communities and for all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
Various forms of Indigenous land tenure provide traditional owners with a range of rights to custodianship. Use of their land is the greatest asset for Indigenous peoples in the north, but the struggle they face is to leverage these rights for economic and social progress. Title to land is by itself not enough. Many Indigenous Australians think that these rights leave them land rich but dirt poor. The bodies representing traditional owners in the land rights and native title systems have a very large burden of responsibility and expectations placed upon them. These bodies have statutory functions to perform, in addition to their roles in advocacy, governance, negotiation and business management.
Despite these critical roles, the financial and capacity building assistance provided by governments is insufficient and creates uncertainty. The committee supports increased financial support as well as secure, long-term funding that is not dependent on annual budget allocations. As a mechanism to provide funding certainty, the committee supports the idea of the establishment of a future fund. It is time that governments acknowledge that native title and land rights bodies are permanent institutions with structural roles in legal and land administration systems.
When looking to future opportunities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the economy of northern Australia, the committee took particular interest in openings in emerging sectors of the economy. There is growing potential in areas such as cultural enterprises and tourism as well as in environmental protection initiatives such as savanna burning, land management, carbon abatement and renewable energy. Opportunities like these have the special strengths of using traditional knowledge of country. They also support efforts to stay connected with country and to fulfil traditional obligations of custodianship. The committee strongly supports the expansion of the Indigenous ranger programs.
Finally, the committee is united in its commitment to the fundamental importance of the principles of free, prior, informed consent, as endorsed by Australia in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. These principles must inform all legislative and other arrangements affecting the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
I would like to conclude with some words of thanks. The committee is grateful to the Indigenous and non-Indigenous organisations and individuals who made submissions to the inquiry and those who appeared in public hearings. Their contributions were vital to the committee's efforts to conduct a comprehensive investigation into the issues facing traditional owners in northern Australia. I would also like to thank my colleagues in the committee for their involvement in the inquiry and their very constructive contributions to the report and its recommendations. Finally, I'd like to express my appreciation for the hard work of the secretariat in supporting the committee and bringing this inquiry to completion.
5:25 pm
Anika Wells (Lilley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
by leave—I will keep my contribution short so that we can hear from the very eminent member for Lingiari in one of his final statements in the House. There would be no better topic to hear from him on than this one. Let me begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the lands on which we table this report, the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples. This always was and always will be Aboriginal land. As we gather here, we should always be mindful that we are standing on the shoulders of 1,600 generations of First Nations peoples, and that is our shared history.
I rise to commend the recommendations of this report. I would like to thank the secretariat for all of their hard work bringing it together in time, along with our chair. These recommendations are an important building block towards meeting the 17 national socioeconomic targets detailed in the national Closing the Gap agreement. Economic growth has been central to political debate about our nation's prosperity, but, to date, Indigenous Australians have largely been excluded from these discussions.
In evidence given to the Joint Standing Committee on Northern Australia, it was abundantly clear that Indigenous Australians support the economic development of northern Australia. Traditional owners are trying to build a better economic future on the lands where they hold native title and land rights. However, traditional owners and their representative bodies are often confronted with an overwhelming workload and limited financial and institutional resources. To facilitate economic and social development opportunities, traditional owners and their representative bodies must consult with their communities and negotiate with corporations, all while meeting a patchwork of statutory obligations created by native title and land rights.
Our report found that there is an urgent need to rethink funding arrangements for representative bodies, to broaden the support they receive. By the destruction of Juukan Gorge, we saw the power balance between traditional owners and developers can only be redressed with human and financial resources and institutional capacity. Traditional owners cannot give free, prior and informed consent that is unfettered by coercion when negotiating land use agreements without access to resources and institutional capacity. The Australian government must increase funding for prescribed body corporates and other Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander bodies with a role in the native title and land rights system. In addition, the federal government must establish an independent fund to administer funding for prescribed body corporates, as recommended in the final report on the destruction of the Indigenous heritage sites at Juukan Gorge, A way forward.
I would like to finish by expressing my deepest condolences on the passing of Uncle Lewis, a founder and board member of Koobara in my electorate of Lilley. Uncle Lewis was a strong leader who had the interests of his community at the front and centre of everything he did. I pass on my sympathy to the entire Koobara community—the wonderful people that you are—and to Aunty Melita, William, Lewis and Susie. I thank the House.
5:28 pm
Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for External Territories) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
by leave—I thank Mr Entsch, as he walks out the door. While he's still here, I want to acknowledge—I want to talk about you, so get in!—that this will be the last occasion that I'll get to speak to a committee report by this committee as a member of parliament. Firstly, I want to acknowledge how well the committee has worked over a number of years and the cooperation from the chair to us. I really do commend the chair for making sure that all views were included and for working collaboratively to get an agreed outcome on our inquiries.
Both the member for Leichhardt and the member for Lilley have outlined some of the important aspects of the recommendations in this report, but I think it needs to be seen as a piece of work which will be ongoing. It's not something of which we can say, 'We've done the job; we've made these recommendations.' It will require us to make sure that governments and this parliament are held to account for ensuring that the recommendations in this report are, as far as possible, carried out.
Most importantly, that will mean carrying on the work of this committee in inquiring into Juukan Gorge, and some of the recommendations in this report flow directly from that inquiry. In particular, recommendation 9 of this report flows, in a way, from the Juukan Gorge report, which made a number of recommendations, including something which I think is well overdue now, and that is a review of the Native Title Act to ensure that we're properly funding prescribed bodies corporate and representative bodies so that they can properly represent the interests of traditional owners and native title holders.
I think there also needs to be a bit of education going on so that people understand the difference between native title, as it exists across the country in its various forms, and land rights, as they exist, in this case, in the Northern Territory, where there's an inalienable freehold title which can't be bought or sold and which gives Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory very powerful rights of withholding consent for development on their land. I think we need to be paying particular attention to this point, and the Member for Leichhardt referred to it: the importance of acknowledging, and doing something about, and ensuring that legislation in this parliament recognises, the principle of free, prior and informed consent, as set out in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. We should be incorporating that in the laws of this country, as they have done in Canada, to make sure that any work which is being done on Aboriginal land or Torres Strait Islander country requires the free, prior and informed consent of the native title holders or traditional owners or those who speak for that country, before any development takes place. That is fundamentally important, in my view, as is the recognition of the fact of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and all that it entails, because I don't think that we, as a nation, have yet understood our obligations in being signatories to that declaration.
I will conclude by saying: the recommendations are all worthy. They are the result of quite a detailed discussion with Aboriginal groups, industry groups and Torres Strait Islander groups from across the country over a number of months. We started this inquiry before we started the Juukan Gorge inquiry. This inquiry was, in part, suspended to allow us to do the Juukan Gorge inquiry, and we again took up this inquiry post the Juukan Gorge report being tabled.
Again, I want to thank the members of the committee and the secretariat. I say again to the member for Leichhardt that we've enjoyed the opportunity to work with him in his capacity as chair of this committee, and I certainly see it as very important that we acknowledge his work. And I might say—she's gone, but I was going to say that the member for Lilley is a breath of fresh air and I'm very pleased she came onto our committee.
5:34 pm
Warren Entsch (Leichhardt, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
I move:
That the House take note of the report.
In doing so, I'll just say thank you very much to the member for Lingiari, who's been a fabulous deputy chair for a long time and a major contributor to some great work. I thank you very much indeed for your service.
Trent Zimmerman (North Sydney, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
Order. The debate is adjourned and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting.